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Google Submits Patent Application For Online Voting (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Google has outlined a concept for real-time online voting in the Google home page in a patent to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Entitled 'Social Voting-Based Campaigns in Search', the application proposes a voting user interface (VUI) that will enable a user to submit one or more votes in a voting-based campaign, giving the hypothetical example of a campaign to vote for the 'Top American Singer', with users authenticated via Google log-ins. If implemented, the system would represent a new foray for Google into generating rather than recording analytics and metrics of popularity.
This would be great for voting down stupid patents.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
thank goodness for that. no chance of fraud there, mates.
is that google pretty much has to patent anything obvious that hasn't been patented yet (e.g. one-click buying) or some troll patents it ("voting--using a computer"). When google patents the digitally enabled iGloo it will come with a patent on method for wiping your ass without dropping your android in the portapotty.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I don't like where this is going.
Have gnu, will travel.
Online voting has been around forever.
They're not patenting "online voting", they've submitted a patent for a particular approach to online voting.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
We have seen how voting can be changed with "trusted" computers and e-voting. Once a bit gets flipped, nobody will know about it. Online voting means that we can now add untrusted computers to the mix, and the next round of malware will go for this.
How about something actually secure? David Chaum has a verifiable means of voting. What is so wrong with paper ballots? No, they are not 100% secure, but it is a lot harder to get physical access to ballots to change entries than it is to add a few lines of code into a device's firmware, or have added functionality on a CPU mask that wasn't specified by the designers, but placed by the fab, just to change an election result.
Elections are too important to have them be "vote early, vote often" concepts. This isn't electing the next American Idol... this is a function critical to how a government works, and should be treated as such.
And if it's a vote Google feels should go a certain way, they can be sure to emphasize the poll to those who their analytics say will vote the right way.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
boy would they love to know your political leanings for ad sales...and to complete your Google Dossier.
There are vaguely smart people here in Slashdot. At this point, I'm comfortable saying that there's NO mass-electronic voting system I'd want to adopt. The attack surface is too high, the rewards for a successful intrusion or intentional modification by the controlling interests are too high, and the benefits are too low.
Electronic voting is fine in small cases, where the number of votes is so low that it's not worth a massive effort to break.
If it's connected, it can be hacked. If it's electronic, it can be modified. Even WORM/DVD-burning systems can be altered via firmware that's not writing what you think it's writing (and falsely spits back info on a "read" to fool at-moment auditing).
You know what humans are good at securing? Little pieces of paper, often with Presidents on them. Usually it involves guns. Doing it at scale requires scaling up your investment. Altering the contents of one polling station's box doesn't mean you've also altered the contents of the other 85,000 that also have ballots. Intrusion is limited by physical restraints. And usually is easy to spot after-the-fact.
It definitely doesn't involve glibc bugs, Romanian hackers (or the State of Romania), and trusting the political process to the cloud.
No thanks.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
As a side-bar to their search page? I'm pretty sure Wordpress and a billion other CMS systems have that already.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
You're pretty sure because you've looked at the wording in the patents?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Come for the voting, stay for the data collection!
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
Read the patent. It's not about voting for presidents or anything like that; it's not about elections. It's literally for people voting on things like "Top American Singer" on social networks and such. It's not designed to prevent voting fraud or anything of that nature... it's really just a fancy description of a webpoll.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
I've been here a while now, and yet I'm still amazed at how many people don't even get past the headline before they have to post (or moderate) a rant almost entirely unrelated to the actual news.
Am I newer here than I thought, is everyone just yelling from their lawns, or has the level of buried rage around here really increased so much?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Wouldn't this just be an example of a multi-question survey? Such systems have existed for decades. Even Compuserve had a version of it. How would voting for the Top American Singer be any different than voting for a product to list on Massdrop?